Detroit thread. Post Kwame, Monica, and $1 houses here.

[Malthus]

Not to worry, I suspect that the endless parade of naked graft and race-bating we have all grown to know and love will continue. 

[Savonarola]

Not to worry, I suspect that the endless parade of naked graft and race-bating we have all grown to know and love will continue. 

If nothing else we'll always have Kwame:

Kilpatrick got cash far ahead of loan signing
Secrecy was part of deal with 4 business leaders
BY JIM SCHAEFER and M.L. ELRICK
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

In a deal meant to be secret, disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick began receiving money from four Detroit business titans months before he actually finalized a loan repayment plan with them, according to records obtained by the Free Press.

The two-page loan agreement is undated. But Kilpatrick signed promissory notes, specifying the terms of the repayment, on Aug. 12. He pledged to repay $60,000 each, plus interest, to the four men: Peter Karmanos, Dan Gilbert, Jim Nicholson and Roger Penske.

That would be months after Kilpatrick received his first disbursement, which he testified last week was for $150,000 on Feb. 4, a day after he emerged from jail following his 4-month sentence in the text message scandal.

The former mayor said in court last week, during a hearing over restitution he owes the City of Detroit, that the amount remaining on the loan deal -- $90,000 -- came this past June. He said he signed over all the money to his wife, Carlita Kilpatrick, and therefore is not able to use the loan money toward the nearly $1 million he still owes the city as part of his plea deal in the text message scandal -- a stance that prosecutors dispute.

The businessmen -- Compuware Chief Executive Officer Karmanos, racing magnate Penske, Quicken Loans founder Gilbert and chemical company executive Nicholson -- declined through spokespeople to discuss details about the transaction or could not be reached for comment Monday. Nicholson was out of the country, a relative said.

Timing raises question: Was it a gift or a loan?
The four businessmen who gave Kilpatrick a nearly quarter-million-dollar loan wanted it kept quiet -- especially from the news media.

A confidentiality agreement accompanying the loan deal prevents Kilpatrick from disclosing the loan to "any media outlet, or to the public at large." It does allow him to tell his accountant, lawyer, tax authorities or anyone else "as required by law."

The loan explicitly requires that Kilpatrick use the money solely to support his wife and children and for "no other purpose." While the loan itself is undated, documents labeled as promissory notes -- in which Kilpatrick vowed to repay the money with interest -- are dated Aug. 12, which means they were crafted after Kilpatrick's restitution payments grew controversial this past summer.

It is unclear whether Kilpatrick signed any earlier agreements with the men. The men indicated last week that they agreed to pay the money at least in part to get Kilpatrick out of office and end a crisis that had crippled the city.

Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning said it is unusual to have a promissory note with a date later than the time the money was loaned, though there is no legal requirement for personal loans to carry promissory notes.

Henning said the timing of the documents raises the question of whether the money was a gift or a loan. He noted that the notes were signed when Kilpatrick's restitution became a contentious issue with prosecutors.

"The importance of calling something a loan is it makes you appear less wealthy than you are," Henning said.

"We stand behind our statement that this was a loan," Penske senior vice president Tony Pordon said. "And it was a loan for the benefit of his family."

A spokesman said Monday that Karmanos sticks by his statement last week that the money was a loan, meant to leverage Kilpatrick from office and help his family.

Kilpatrick said he received his first payment from the loan, which he testified last week was for $150,000, in early February, a day after he emerged from jail following his 4-month sentence in the text message scandal.

The $90,000 left on the loan came in June, he testified.

The agreement came to light Thursday when Wayne County Circuit Judge David Groner ordered Kilpatrick to take the witness stand during a hearing to determine whether the former mayor has been forthright about his financial ability to make full restitution to the city. In court, prosecutors peppered Kilpatrick with questions about the loan documents.

The hearing resumes Nov. 17.

Wayne County prosecutors want Kilpatrick found in violation of his probation for allegedly not being honest about his ability to pay his restitution.

Kilpatrick received $60,000 from each man, the documents show. He agreed to make quarterly payments a year of about $8,000 starting in November 2010 for 10 years, at 6% interest.

In March, Kilpatrick told Groner he had just $6 left over after paying his monthly expenses.

It turns out that Matty Moroun owner of the bridge and slumlord extraordinare gave him a "Loan" of $50,000 in addition to the $240,000 listed above.

[Zanza]

So, it looks like I might work in Farmington Hills from February to April.  How is that neighbourhood?

[Ed Anger]

So, it looks like I might work in Farmington Hills from February to April.  How is that neighbourhood?

I hope you like snow.

[JacobL]

While at the court supporting my brother on Tuesday Charles Rodgers it seems had a court appointment that day also.  Sadly I didn't get turned around in time to see him, he got to deal with whatever issue he had behind closed doors.

[Zanza]

I hope you like snow.

Snow is alright. The alternative is probably East Asia (most likely Singapore).

[Capetan Mihali]

So, it looks like I might work in Farmington Hills from February to April.  How is that neighbourhood?

Livonia Meet-up '010! 

[frunk]

My girlfriend lived in there this summer.  Other than disliking the Detroit area in general I don't think she minded it.

[Ed Anger]

I hope you like snow.

Snow is alright. The alternative is probably East Asia (most likely Singapore).

I looked it up and it said "affluent". Stay out of the city core and you'll be all right.

[Savonarola]

The Lord of the Bling is back in court discussing his finances:

Kilpatrick plays while city pays

A few hours listening to Kwame Kilpatrick on Monday explains a lot about the city's current status as an international symbol of incompetence and despair.

On the witness stand, he admitted his failings with finances, explaining that wife Carlita is better with money than he. ("I don't know which account she's paying from.") Oh, really?

She's the good wife who spends $15,770 on cosmetic surgery and leases a $5,500-per-month home in Dallas's most exclusive suburb even though she knows her husband owes the city $1 million.

Do you want to know how the city got to be the wreck that it is? These interminable court proceedings, delving into Kilpatrick's finances, document the former mayor's contempt for details like truth and his fast-fingered knack for creative accounting, even when paying for smoothies.

  The city he left for dead is burdened by a $300 million deficit, byzantine accounting and so much financial murkiness that two successors, Kenneth Cockrel Jr. and Dave Bing, have struggled to find the bottom.

Living on others' cash
Kilpatrick's never made more than $176,000 a year as mayor and now earns $120,000 a year, but lives like a multimillionaire -- even though his big hidden assets appear to be a motorcycle and $21,000 in a bank account. Would it take a week of hearings to ferret out your assets, months after a court order to disclose them?

Unlike most of us, Kwame Kilpatrick, who grew up in a family of political operatives, doesn't live on actual income. He has access to other people's money. He's got the Kilpatrick Civic Fund to raid for occasional expenses, such as moving costs and "transitional housing" -- $9,400 for his family's lease at the Park Shelton condominiums, a $13,000 loan for family vacations.

He and Carlita Kilpatrick received at least $240,000 from wealthy business connections -- most in "loans" that he seems no more pressed to repay than the chunk he owes the city. Such sizable debts might crush you or me -- but they are ants ruining the Kilpatrick picnic, with its Texas mansion, Gucci shopping trips and $158 bills at the nail salon.

Financial aid expected
Kwame-nomics has its own inherent logic, not that you'll find it on a balance sheet or in a financial planning seminar.

"When we get the loot, we're going to take her all the way out," he huffed about Prosecutor Kym Worthy on the jail telephone, speaking over the announcement that all calls are recorded, and sounding like Don Corleone.

When asked on the witness stand about this comment, he explained his coming wealth. "I just knew that an abundance would come ... I would be blessed," he answered.

For Kwame Kilpatrick, life is magic, and money comes to those Kilpatricks so entitled. Neither jail nor legal bills seem to have dampened this view: The ambulance is coming. Rescue is on its way.

"In a few months, this conversation is going to be funny to us, like most of the money conversations we have," he said on the phone, reassuring Carlita about their future.

A full year later, he may be the only one laughing.

I know what Kwame sounds like; yet whenever I read quotes from him in the papers I imagine them in  Biggy Small's voice.

[Jacob]

So, it looks like I might work in Farmington Hills from February to April.  How is that neighbourhood?

You're picking Detroit over Singapore?

[Savonarola]

Meanwhile DPS is still setting records:

Detroit students score record low on national math test
Marisa Schultz / The Detroit News
Detroit Public Schools students posted the worst math results ever recorded in the 40-year history of a prestigious nationwide test, according to scores released today.

Sixty-nine percent of fourth-graders and 77 percent of eighth-graders scored below basic skill levels in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test that serves as a nationwide yardstick in measuring student learning.

"These numbers are only slightly better than what one would expect by chance as if the kids had never gone to school and simply guessed at the answers," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts. "These numbers ... are shocking and appalling and should not be allowed to stand."

The test results are so concerning to the welfare of Detroit that Casserly flew to the city to brief the media, along with DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, ahead of their release. Unless the community takes action to fix these urgent academic problems, "this city has no future," he said.

"Only a complete overhaul of this school system and how students are taught should be permitted at this point, because the results ... signal a complete failure of the grown-ups who have been in charge of the schools in the past," Casserly said during an interview with The Detroit News.

The test scores, Bobb said during a press conference Tuesday morning, further demonstrates the district faces an "an academic emergency" and needs an overhaul of its academic plan. And while Bobb indicated the scores were an indication of a systemwide failure, it was clear he placed much of the responsibility at the feet of the Detroit School Board.

Two action plans, including the 2006 Governor's Transition Team Report, have largely been ignored by the school board, he said.

"If we had implemented 60 percent, 70 percent or 80 percent of what's in those plans, there wouldn't be a need right now for an emergency financial manager," Bobb said.

At another point Tuesday, Bobb said: "If these results were produced by the members of a corporate board of directors, I can tell you that board would be removed."

He blamed school principals and a failing curriculum that doesn't prepare students for the national test.

Bobb was appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in March to fix the district's finances, but has been lobbying for academic control over the district as well.

However, the elected school board believes it has power over academics and sued Bobb this year for violating their authority. Bobb countersued, saying the board violated his orders when it appointed Teresa Gueyser as general superintendent. Both sides are scheduled to appear in Wayne Circuit Court on Wednesday for a hearing on the case, which should clear up who has the power over curriculum.

Gueyser introduced her own detailed academic plan for the district this year and the 11-member school board embraced it. However, it awaits funding from Bobb.

The NAEP test started in 1969. Former Superintendent Connie Calloway's team signed Detroit up for the test that's often considered the gold standard of student assessment. A sample of DPS fourth- and eighth-graders participated for the first time this year in the test administered in January and March.

Bobb pledged Friday to move aggressively to implement his own academic plan that will "throw out" the current system, he said.

He won't release a copy of the draft plan because he said it's not complete, but said it's a "robust" plan that's funded through federal stimulus grants, including an application for $80 million in federal Race to the Top program funds. It would include working with outside private firms, something board members and community activists have balked at as a ploy to turn public schools to charters.

"We are going to continue to fight for the academic controls," Bobb said.

The average composite score for fourth-graders was 200 (on a scale of 0-500), and the national average was 239. The results show DPS students had trouble with basic skills. Just 33 percent of fourth-graders could subtract 75 from 301, whereas 67 percent of kids nationwide correctly computed the answer.

The average composite score for eighth-graders was 238 (not comparable to the fourth-graders' scale), whereas the nationwide average was 282. Students had trouble on questions ranging from geometry to estimation.

Students, however, aren't to blame for the poor scores, Bobb said.

"The real fault lies squarely with leadership," he said. "It's not the kids' fault. There's nothing wrong with these kids' minds."

It  isn't a huge surprise that a school system that so wantonly misspends money as Detroit would not adequately prepare students for the standardized tests; but the problem here is exacerbated now because Michigan has recently implemented school of choice and vouchers.  Parents who are involved in their children's education will usually send their children to either a suburban school or a charter school .

[Savonarola]

And my personal favorite story of the day:

Homeless shelter officials to plead guilty to using $750K for causes
BY BEN SCHMITT AND M.L. ELRICK
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

The two top officials of a homeless shelter accused of funneling $750,000 in taxpayer dollars to political causes associated with officials ranging from Kwame Kilpatrick to Gov. Jennifer Granholm are expected to plead guilty to federal charges today.

Jon Rutherford, president and chief executive officer of Metro Emergency Services, and bookkeeper Judith Bugaiski were indicted in 2006 on a combined 22 counts.

U.S. District Judge Marianne Battani is scheduled to hear the guilty pleas at a 4 p.m. today.

Prosecutors allege Rutherford created a shell company to collect rent from the shelter, then channeled that money to political causes. As a nonprofit, the shelter would have lost its tax-exempt status for making political donations.

According to documents the Free Press obtained, IRS investigators said the shell company "spends virtually every dollar it receives" from the shelter "on either so-called charitable contributions, political contributions, political action committees and to individuals."

The IRS said those receiving thousands of dollars included the Kilpatrick Civic Fund, the Kilpatrick family's Next Vision Foundation, Kilpatrick's Next Generation PAC and the "Jennifer Granholm Inaugural Party."

The IRS probe stems from a 2001 Free Press report that revealed that Rutherford gave $50,000 to the nonprofit Kilpatrick Civic Fund during Kilpatrick's 2001 run for mayor. Kilpatrick, then an influential state representative, subsequently wrote a letter to the Detroit-Wayne County Mental Health Board, recommending it give Rutherford a multimillion-dollar contract.

Stealing from the homeless and giving to Kwame Kilpatrick, it's just like Robin Hood.

[jimmy olsen]

Stealing from the homeless and giving to Kwame Kilpatrick, it's just like Robin Hood.

Great line.

[Savonarola]

And just in time for your hoiday feast:

Detroit's Coon Man takes orders for the holiday
Charlie LeDuff / The Detroit News
Grass Lake

There was no moon and the old fella tripped over the darkness trying to keep up with his hounds.

The dogs were deep in the forest somewhere, baying at a raccoon they had run up a tree.

  The old fella picked himself up and sat for a spell on a damp log trying to collect his breath.

"Most people dies in a nursing home and give up," he said in a thick backwoods drawl, dressed in greasy hunting greens that smelled of wood smoke and raccoon musk. "I don't mind if I die out here. Least I got something to go for."

Gleamie Dean Beasley, as you may remember, is the Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman who modestly calls himself the Coon Man.

And these are the busy days for the Coon Man. Transplanted Southerners, who consider raccoon meat a delicacy, have placed their orders early with Beasley, expecting to have the roast beast on their holiday tables.

"I deliver for a $5 charge," Beasley informed from his secret hunting grounds here in Jackson County about an hour's drive west of Detroit. "For $25, I cook and deliver. Baked or baked with barbecue sauce. No extra charge."

Since appearing in these news pages in March, Beasley, 71, has become something of an international celebrity. He figures he has granted a hundred interviews and is routinely portrayed as an old man stranded in poverty, living off the land, supplementing his Social Security check with the sale of coon meat and pelts. He is painted as a throwback to Detroit's heyday, when Southerners migrated north in search of a factory job and a house and a car, bringing with them their music and food and habits of speech.

The reporters and chroniclers and documentarians have come from Mexico and Amsterdam and Berlin and London and New York. They have filmed him in his kitchen with the peeling wallpaper, cooking coon in his tumbledown, grease-stained stove. They have recorded him on his sagging sofa playing the blues guitar.

They came. They took. They left.

And the Coon Man remains in his broken-down, west-side neighborhood with the empty houses and burned out street lights and the wild game running through the vacant fields.

But when the ledger is tallied, Gleamie Dean Beasley considers himself a winner in life.

The Coon Man has lost some: his best dog was killed by a hit-and-run hunter, his best girl was stolen by a man he calls Slick Willy; his best coon rifle was mistakenly left behind in the woods recently as he stopped to check his bearings in a faulty compass.

It is easy to get lost in what you don't have, Beasley said. It is easy to despair about what you once had. The trick to getting through the hard times, he said, is to remember what you do have.

Beasley grew up in a shack in Three Creeks, Ark. The son of a sharecropper, he left school at 13 to pick cotton. Cotton prices went bad and he arrived in Detroit six years later in 1958.

Michigan gave him everything a man could ask. It gave him three children, five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. It gave him a job and a house. It gave him clean water and big woods and plenty of wild game.

"I got lots to be thankful for," he reckoned. "I guess I'll stay with my family here. I made my first $100 here. I ain't never seen a Fifty or a Hundred. So, it's been good to me. So I hate to say, 'Screw you, I got all I can get and I'm gone.' A lotta people did but I couldn't do that. I couldn't run Detroit down 'cause I did better'n I ever did in my life.

"It give me a lot, Detroit. I'm not quitting it. It wouldn't seem right. Somebody gotta stay. Maybe if it was like it was, like it used to be, then I feel like I could do it. But I can't. I can't. I'm thankful for what the city give me. I guess I'll go down with it."

The baying of the hounds grew to a howl like a fiddle whining in the hills. Their call ricocheted through the night. The Coon Man stood and tapped the little compass he kept on a string around his neck.

East, it read.

He tapped it again. South, it read.

He tapped it again. Southeast, it read.

Satisfied, the Coon Man -- as sturdy as a billy goat -- set off into the darkness with his bolt-action .22.

Somebody's Thanksgiving supper was hiding up a tree.